FarStone: Online Backup is Good but Not Enough

Southern California based FarStone makers of RestoreIT and DriveClone has been hearing the call for businesses to backup their applications to the Internet. While this solution is good, what happens if you can’t get to the Internet when you need your data?
“We like to say RestoreIT is the missing piece of the backup puzzle,” says Tom Fedro, executive vice president at FarStone. “What good is online storage if you can’t get to your data, or what’s stored online is several days, weeks or even months old? We add value by providing instant and pain-free recovery from PC problems caused by any number of issues including: malware intrusions, faulty software installations, inadvertently deleted files or even an operating system crash or hard drive failure.”
On the competition, FarStone told me that the biggest advantage of our core technology over Symantec is the fact that we take our system snapshots (incremental backups) at the sector level and not file level, stored in Windows folders. Instead, RestoreIT snapshots are secure in a hidden protected partition (free from danger of being accidentally deleted).
Their press release reads – Developers of data recovery software, a relatively new class of application, often claim their products can rebuild entire systems, returning them to normal. But not all recovery products are created equal.
To be truly effective, recovery software must keep track of all changes, in real time, at the most granular increments, the sector / block level, of a hard drive. Ongoing incremental backup means a snapshot is created of these real time changes on a cadence determined by the user or by default when the software is installed, ensuring successful system recovery should a digital disaster occur. Further, unless the recovery software continues to work when an operating system crashes, there’s little hope of retrieving most data or applications. For that reason, users should choose a ‘pre-OS’ utility, meaning that it loads before the operating system does, even if the OS doesn’t load at all.
As obvious as all that seems, it’s surprising how many recovery products fall short of those basic requirement.Symantec has recently released a new version of its BackupExec and Ghost (read my coverage of Ghost).